Computing machinery can be monitored automatically (by other computing machinery) to obtain information such as computational throughput, resource requests and actual resource usage over time, uptime/downtime, attempted or actual security breaches, malware status, physical location, upgrade deployment status, user credentials, and other characteristics. Monitoring capabilities may be implemented using agents or other software on monitored machines; such software may then report information in real time, or report intermittently, or report when requested, but in any case provides raw data to the monitoring entity. Data obtained from a monitored machine is considered “raw” for present purposes even if it has been processed somewhat on the monitored machine before being reported.
The raw data gathered from monitored machines may be processed into a form suitable to the kind of monitoring being done and to the goals of that monitoring. For example, when a goal of monitoring is to understand more about which users make use of which monitored machines, a list of users who logged into a machine may be created from the raw data, or a list of the machines that a given user logged into may be created. Other kinds of monitoring may, of course, have different goals and may gather and utilize different kinds of data.